


you and i, we're these small quiet moments in the dark

by manticoremoons



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Drabble, F/M, Ficlet, Grief/Mourning, Smut, a little slice of, an alternate 8x05, in which dany is grief-struck frightened and under siege and jon does NOT leave her alone, in which jon and dany love each other at their ugliest and scariest, in which these two last targaryens love each other and take care of each other, that is LITERALLY all we wanted smh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-04
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-04-07 18:49:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19090978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manticoremoons/pseuds/manticoremoons
Summary: "He’s made her so many promises. He hopes that this is one he’ll keep."





	you and i, we're these small quiet moments in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> I am sure we all had different ideas about how 8x05 should have played out. This imagines that Jon is the one who approaches Dany in that map / council room, and finds her grieving and probably delirious from her hunger strike, and instead of lurking stupidly, he does what his heart was made to do. He comforts her. And things play out from there. 
> 
> So I have all these random drabbles that I started during that final season and never finished, or threw away because they aren't any good. Since my other fics that I'm trying to do are currently refusing to write themselves (why are words so hard?), I figured I'd post this wee ficlet because it's not too shit and I love these bruised, broken, burnt-out kids too much. It's a bit on the purple side probably but readable, one hopes! Totally unbeta-d, all mistakes are mine but the characters are borrowed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He finds her in the map room.

A lonely candle sputters miserably in its wick in the centre of the painted table, its light barely penetrating the darkness that shrouds the room. A storm rages outside, the force of the winds making the castle creak as if these centuries-old walls might crumble at any moment. The tempest had come out of nowhere, and he can only be thankful that their ships had dropped anchor at Dragonstone before it broke—elsewise, he would still be a sea away. Away from  _her_ , stuck with the bulk of their troops outside King’s Landing.

An unacceptable scenario ever since he’d received the dire news.

She stands at the wide windows, the gusts of salty sea air rifling through her unbound hair. Her mourning cloak is inky black, stark contrast to the bone-white tendrils that make their way down her back, slender as snakes. Even with her face turned away from him, her body curling in on itself in a way he’s never seen it, she’s hard to look at, lightning arcing against a night sky, too bright and brilliant to be real.

He feels the way he did when they first met. As though his tongue is too big for his mouth, unsure of how best to approach this strange beautiful queen in her natural habitat but drawn to her nonetheless, helpless as a moth.

Shutting the door behind him with a gentle thud, he takes a step or two closer and waits.

Mere weeks ago, he would have walked right up to her and gathered her up in his arms, breathed her in, the salt and smoke and fire of her. He would have pressed his mouth to her cheek and her throat and her rosy lips, rubbed the warmth back into her pale skin, comforted her in the best ways he knew how, ready to throw his body and his heart at her feet to do with what she willed.

But they are not the same people they were mere weeks ago. Before the Great War, before the lights of thousands of arakhs and spears of were smothered by Death, before he’d found out the truth of himself and told her—a night that had changed everything for them both.  

He’s not known  _how_  to be around her since.

It seems so stupid now. There’s no time to waste for either of them, he already feels that he’s been living on borrowed time since he woke on that cold, dank table. He’d been so sure that he wouldn’t survive the Long Night, and he had, inexplicably.

And all along the King’s Road as they travelled here, he’d wondered to himself:  _now what_? For so long, his life has known a single purpose, and the clarity of it had governed every breath he took, every day, every step. Well, now he doesn’t know what comes next—except her.

“You came,” she says. Her voice is tired, and fragile. This is not the woman who confronted him in her cavernous throne room that first day, she’s not even the woman with whom he and the living celebrated surviving the great war mere weeks ago, she’s not the woman who made love to him behind an icy waterfall.

It’s a side of her he hasn’t really seen.

“As soon as I heard.”

Even Ser Davos had been shocked at the brusqueness with which he’d demanded a ship— _any bloody ship_ —when they’d received word that Rhaegal and Missandei had fallen just as they were passing Darry. He had quickly called all the commanders of their meagre forces together, the Northmen, the Dothraki and the Unsullied, and ordered them to continue towards King’s Landing and make camp near the Sow’s Horn. He would ride hard to Rook’s Rest with Ser Davos and a small party to find a ship and sail towards Dragonstone with haste. At the time, he’d wished for nothing more than wings that would allow him to fly across Blackwater Bay to be with her, but he’d had to rely on mere mortal means. He would have rowed to Dragonstone himself in a skiff, if that’s what it took.

She tilts her head at him, her brow furling in confusion. “Why?”

That draws him up short, his mouth agape. “What?”  _What_.

“Why would you come?”

With not a little horror, it dawns on him. She doesn’t know.  _How could she not know?_

Everything he could say in response to her question clamours on the tip of his tongue.

How could she not know that he  _needed_  her? That being apart from her hurt, made him ache in some essential part of him. That too many hours and days spent without even a glimpse of her smile, or her pretty plaited hair, or just her, any way he could have her, was a misery? That the thought of her in pain had made him feel helpless and angry that he could not make all this endless horror and loss she had endured go away, murderous that he could not find the source of her sadness, root it out and do the only thing he was good at in killing it? How  _could_  she—

But he  _knew_  why. And shame lanced through him for it was his own fault that she didn’t know the depth of his feelings for her. He could see it now.

“Because, I did not wish for you to be alone,” he says. It is inadequate, but he’s not ever been one for words. He isn’t sure what he expected but the chuckle that escapes her drawn lips is not it. It’s an unpleasant scoff, sad and abrasive.

“You are kind, my lord.” The tired formality makes him flinch. “You need not have bothered for I’m always alone, you see. I’m used to it now.”

“Dany—.”

She cuts him off, rambling in that alarming and defeated way. “When I was a child, I dreamed that there could be a day that Viserys and I could stop running. A  _place_  where we could be safe. Where we could be a family. Where we could have a home. No one wanted us, but I hoped maybe, one day.” With a frown of confusion, she continues, “I loved my brother. But he was not a person who could make me feel safe. And when he died, I said I wouldn’t miss him. I told myself, if I look back, I’m lost.”

The words kept tumbling from her lips, a confused rush. “But I missed him—I  _did_. I named Viserion for him, you see? I’m not a monster, I’m not. Then I lost my husband, and then my son. I thought, perhaps I can still have a home with the Dothraki. I made myself a family. My dragons. Irri, Rakharo, Ser Barristan, Ser Jorah… Missandei.” She chokes on her litany, her face ravaged with tears.

“But they are all gone. They keep  _dying_ , and I am still here.  _Alone_. With nothing but their ghosts… what kind of monster am I? That they keep leaving me alone? Even  _you_. Even you, left me alone.”

She’s crying now, and he can do nothing but stride towards her, one step and another, and do what he wanted from the first: gather her up in his arms. Her whole body is wracked with sobs, the kind drawn from some darkness within, that make her chest jerk upward with the sheer effort it takes to simply breathe. The storm battering the castle walls is a mere shadow to the grief and agony held within her delicate body. So, he holds her. Weathers the pain as he can, uses what little strength he has to hold onto her, and her terrible sorrow. He may as well be a spindly raft in the middle of a storm—but he tries.

“I’m here,” he says. A promise, even if she doesn’t hear it. “I’m  _here_.”

 

# *

She scares him.

He can think it in his head, and it’s not too much a betrayal. But perhaps the most honest he’s been of late.

The smell of Varys’ flesh lingers in his nostrils. Beyond the wall, in his time with the Free Folk, he’d tasted elk roasted over a spluttering fire. And the smell reminds him, incongruously, of that mixed in with the pungent oils and perfumes Varys must have used when he lived, and the piss the man must have released when the terror truly hit him. But he hadn’t screamed, a secretive spymaster to the last. The only thing left on the craggy cliffs on Dragonstone is a charred patch where the master of whispers once stood.

It disturbs him, and it shouldn’t, for the man was a traitor. He  _knows_  that. And the rage he felt at the fact that Varys had tried to poison her, still fizzles in his veins. He would have done the killing himself if she’d asked. But she didn’t. And for that he could respect her.  _The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword_. He hears his father whisper those words on the wind. It’s only that her “sword” is a dragon but perhaps no different than his own.

_So why disturbed?_

He gazes at her profile then. The dim glow of the torches her Unsullied carry casts half of her in shadow, a mystery. But then she turns towards him and he can see the grim acceptance of a queen’s justice served. Her lips are drawn, pale and unsmiling, and the tiredness in her drooping eyes says too much. Yet there is such resolve there, in the stiff straight back and squared shoulders. Her grief has hardened into something else, sharper and even more dangerous.

He watches her walk away from him and Tyrion and her guards. She does not turn back.

Before he follows her, he looks back at the spot where the recently executed lord once stood.

It shouldn’t be so easy, perhaps. There is no corpse, no pool of blood. The last trace of Lord Varys will be gone come morning, washed away by the waves crashing high on these cliffs.

And he thinks of wading waist-deep through bodies of dead. Mance Raydar’s people, and the feel of Ygritte’s body grown limp in his arms. The crunch of bone and soft tissue as his bloodied fist pummelled Ramsey Bolton’s face beyond recognition, his own boiled leather armour soaked through with the blood of all the men he’d killed on the battlefield.

Their blood feels all too real for him even now, weeks, months and years later.

 _Dracarys_.

He wonders if killing should be so easy as to say one word, or utter none at all, and leave nothing but charred ash ready to be blown away by the wind or washed away by the ocean’s spray.

He wonders if any of this is easy at all for her. Maybe he has it all wrong. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

 _You know nothing_ , a quiet voice reminds him. Or perhaps it’s just the wind.

 

# *

 

“Is that all I am to you? Your Queen?”

Her lips are soft against his, and he can feel his own mouth, watering with the urge to taste her. To take her. To show her everything she is to him and drown out everything else. It’s  _too_  much, the things he feels. Like an over-stuffed wineskin, strained and bursting at the seams. And he has few words to explain it to her or himself.

When her tongue dabs at him, kitten-like, he reaches back with his own.

 

# *

 

“Are you afraid of me, Jon Snow?”

He gasps as her soft, wet tongue slides down the length of his cock.  _Fuck_ , he’d missed this. He’d be a liar if he claimed he didn’t.

And he’d tried to deny it, deny  _her_  and everything she represents. Almost running from her solar after he’d spoken with her earlier, her heavy words weighing on him.  _Let it be fear, then_. 

And a part of him is afraid of her. Their relation was too close, not unheard of in all of Westeros, even the North. But close enough that it confused him. But another part of him, the one grasping desperately at the wall with one hand and her un-braided hair with the other, wants to live inside the storm of her, wants to allow her to leave him wrecked and broken on the shores, spent.

He lets out a jagged moan when she takes him fully into her mouth, a wet glove sliding all the way down to the root so he feels the head of his cock nudging at her throat.

She pulls off with an obscene pop and asks again. “Do you fear me?”

He bangs his head back against the wall, delirious. Her fingers are dabbling his balls, the slick glide of her mouth on him, and he’s too far gone to be anything but honest.

“ _Some_ —times,” he blurts, his voice raspy with want.

She chuckles then, and he feels it all the way down his spine with her mouth half-full of his cock. She pulls off, and looks up at him with half-lidded eyes, the fey mix of sapphire blue and fire-gold in her irises almost completely blacked-out.

“Good.”

He forgets all of that soon enough. His fears, his questions, his doubts.

All of them crumble by the wayside when he spills into her mouth and watches her lick him clean.

They wither to dust when he drags her up, and pushes her towards her bed, kneels before her and devours her as though she were his last meal.

When her thighs seize around his head and he tastes her release, musky and sweet, rubs his beard against her so she arches even higher against him, they may as well have never existed.

And then he fucks her, locking one of her legs over his arm so he can plunge in deep, let her swallow him in her cunt’s tight clutch, be as close to a dragon as any human, and still survive.

_You’re a dragon, too._

The reminder echoes in his head in a sibilant whisper that reminds him of the red witch. He’s tried to forget this, but here, fucking her like this, it feels right. He cups one plush tit in his hand, pinches her nipples until they furl pretty and pink at him, bends down to lick and bite with a hunger that borders on feral.

It’s all so simple here and now. She and him. Their bodies moving in such perfect tandem that they may as well have been doing this for centuries.

 

# *

 

In the hours of the wolf, just before dawn, before they must rise and prepare for battle, she says, “I’ve learned something these many weeks.”

He waits.

“I think love— _real_  love, walks hand in hand with fear. Of losing, of getting hurt and being left alone.” _And I'm afraid of you and how_ you _could break me, Jon Snow_ , is what she doesn't say out loud.

He thinks on it, thinks about his earliest memories. Of the little boy he’d once been seated at the lowliest table in Winterfell’s great hall, watching his beloved siblings, and his honourable father with his good wife laughing together from a distance, longing in his heart. And for the first time in such a long time, since before the truth of his true parentage had reared its ugly head between them, he completely understands her. The way he’d understood on the boat, in those quiet moments in the dark.

Even before they’d known they were the last of their kind, on that boat, they’d  _seen_  each other. There’d been nothing and no one else to get in the way. And that’s all he’s ever wanted even as a lad of four, to be  _seen_ , and loved, and wanted.

So, he says, “You’re not alone.” He glides his fingers down the line of her back, pressing down on each delicate vertebra. “I’ll not leave you alone.”

He’s made her so many promises. He hopes that this is one he’ll keep.

 

#  **fin.**

 

**Author's Note:**

> Drop me a note, or whatever. Thanks for reading!


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